Halo creator Bungie was against the development of RTS spin-off Halo Wars, as the studio believed that Microsoft was “whoring out our franchise.”

That’s according to Ensemble Studios founder Tony Goodman. Ensemble headed up development on the console RTS, which Goodman believes is a "really fantastic, under-recognized product."

Goodman revealed that the game initially had nothing to do with the Halo franchise, but a risk-averse Microsoft insisted that the project was reimagined in order to offset risk.

"Microsoft was pretty risk averse and they said, 'I don't know if we want to take the risk of creating strategy games on a console. We'd feel better if Halo were attached to it," explained Goodman. As a result Ensemble were asked to "just paint over what you have with Halo stuff."

"Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it," said Goodman. "Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise or something.”

He continued, "Yeah, that didn't create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise]."